


Candle // Ghost

by mythicalamity



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Hauntober prompt, M/M, Prompt Fic, Resolved Sexual Tension, Supernatural Elements, seance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27164782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythicalamity/pseuds/mythicalamity
Summary: Rhett and Link have the perfect idea for a vlog for the Halloween season. But things get real, real quick.
Relationships: Rhett McLaughlin/Link Neal
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31
Collections: Hauntober 2020





	1. Candle

The room smelled of leather, sandalwood, sage, and a hint of vanilla. Crystal, the medium that had agreed to meet with them in her shop of occult oddities, had been very gracious in giving Rhett and Link the tour and history of the building. Rhett was no expert of energies or vibrations, but he did know that something about this woman felt light and peaceful. He hoped that Link was feeling the same things, and that it was putting him at ease. He was well aware that his best friend and creative partner had some reservations about this vlog idea. 

Crystal’s soothing voice informed them as they walked through floors of the building, stopping to display vintage photographs from the early days. “These two men fled from the east together in the 1850s, like so many people did. But rather than seek their fortunes panning for gold as prospectors, they opened this hotel, providing comfort and shelter for the desperate folk that had come out to California during the Gold Rush. It was a very well favored and successful endeavor for the friends, who kept rooms of their own on the third floor.”

Rhett was fascinated by the history of the space, and now the mysterious occult objects that adorned it now. He was mindful not to touch anything, and he could tell that Link’s nerves were still in high gear as he hadn’t asked any awkward off the cuff questions. Link remained quiet, though his eyes were curious. 

They took their seats at the small round table, for the real reason they’d come here: they were going to see if Crystal could help them commune with the dead. No one specific, though Rhett reckoned there had to be all sorts of people that passed through this hotel as a stop along their travels and then, well, passed… The room was completely dark aside from a couple of white and pale pink candles. 

“Welcome, Rhett and Link,” Crystal said in an airy voice that reminded Rhett of windchimes in a gentle breeze. It was soothing, but it made the hairs on his neck stand on end. He looked at the symbols that covered the table, and then over to the upside down shot glass. He’d done his fair share of *boopity-boop-boop* research and knew that this must be her spirit table, like a Ouiji board without the big name branding. 

“I trust you took your salt baths as directed?” 

Rhett nodded, while Link joked, “Yeah, that’s one way to easily identify every minor scratch, scrape or raw spot on each and every part of your body.”

Rhett chuckled, and Crystal smiled softly. 

“I can feel the positive energy of your friendship filling the room. This is a wonderfully open and inviting vibration to channel. You never want to have any hesitant or closed energies.”

Rhett couldn’t help his eyes shooting at Link. Link cleared his throat and looked down at the table. 

“Is there a problem?” Crystal asked. 

“Link?” Rhett prompted. He didn’t know what he expected to happen here today. He really just wanted a nice and atmospheric setting for their vlog that they’d be able to release toward the end of October. If either of them happened to flinch or get scared, or if a candle went out during their séance… all that was gravy. But he was open to the idea of these energies and vibrations Crystal had briefed them on, and he certainly wasn’t trying to set them up to bring over anything dark or negative. Crystal had assured them, when they had met with her in advance, that they had good vibrations… whatever _that_ meant - aside from setting himself up for a week of having that Beach Boys song stuck in his head. She said their positive energy was stronger when they were together than when she’d met with either of them separately. She predicted that they may be able to draw forth energies of love, light, and friendship. Rhett didn’t want Link’s subtle reluctance opening them up for anything wilder than that. 

“I’m not hesitant, or closed,” Link insisted, as he adjusted his camera. “While we _are_ doing this for the vlogs, which are enjoyed as entertainment, I don’t want people thinking that we are making fun or like… exploiting something that some people really do believe in, you know?”

Link’s eyes shot over to Crystal, the nearest representative of those that believed. Or at least made her living by advertising convincingly that she did.

Crystal took Link’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I don’t feel any of that in your intentions, and I am by trade a fair judge of people’s energies. If you are uncomfortable at any point during the séance, we can stop.”

“And it’s not a livestream,” Rhett reminded him. “We get final cut. If it doesn’t feel right when we watch it back, we can scrap the whole thing.” Rhett looked over at Crystal. Rhett didn’t think she was the type to get offended or preoccupied with whether or not the video was good advertising for her shop. And as he’d predicted, she sat there smiling: serene and unfazed. 

“All right,” Link agreed, lifting his upturned palms and taking a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

Rhett touched his hands to Link’s and Crystal’s and focused on his own breathing as she began the opening prayer. There was some gentle chanting that led Rhett to fall into a near meditative state. He felt relaxed. He felt open. Crystal chanted welcoming words to any friendly spirits, and expressed an interest from those that had previously inhabited the building for however brief a stay. 

“We have many friends from beyond that are connecting with your vibrations!” She seemed genuinely delighted, which was contagious as far as Rhett was concerned. 

Rhett stole a glance at Link, hoping to see him at least a little more relaxed and maybe even feeling some of that calm and meditative energy Rhett was experiencing. 

Link looked beyond calm. He looked... asleep! Just then a chill ran up Rhett’s spine and his hair stood aggressively on end. Like the electricity in the air might lift his skin clean off his frame. It should have felt alarming, but he felt numb and protected. 

The air was stolen from Rhett’s lungs until he was left with a thin stream of air that wheezed in and out with a high reedy squeak. The rest of the oxygen in the room was swept up in a breeze that gusted past Rhett, to his left, and Rhett’s eyes followed the wind while the rest of his body sat immobile, like a gigantic paperweight. 

One would have thought that the force of the wind would have extinguished the candles, but instead their flames _rose_. The sight made Rhett’s heart race. His inner panic heightened by the blank expression on Link’s face, and the way that Crystal continued her monotone chanting as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening within their circle. 

Rhett’s body felt too heavy, or too light? Either way he had no control of his limbs to break the circle of their hands, and the air was too fragile for him to form words. It was all he could do to continue breathing, and hold his eyes open to the incredible happenings before him. 

The air seemed to concentrate at Link’s position, swirling around him, causing his hair to rise like static. 

Suddenly, Link’s eyes flew open wide. Wide and unfamiliar. The brilliant blue seemed to have been sucked out, and his eyes were reduced to a pale and empty icy blue. The color was barely perceptible. Rhett’s jaw hung open as they… _lit up_ . There was no other way to describe it. The glow was not a warm reflection of the inexplicable and warm candlelight, the iridescent cool luminosity seemed to come from something _within_ his best friend’s core as the rest of his full and lively face went gaunt and colorless.

The sight was equal parts awesome and terrifying. 

Rhett glanced at Crystal and his chest tightened with fear, or maybe not fear, but an unnamable feeling of excitement in the face of the unknown that he held in his heart when he observed that her eyes had gone blank and milky white. Her jaw hung loosely open as Link began to speak. The voice that came forward was not Link’s voice. _“This friendship... feels like home.”_

“Welcome, spirit,” Crystal said as casually and warm as she had welcomed Rhett and Link into her shop. “Is this your home?”

_“We lived here for over 50 years, when we owned and ran this hotel together. But the home of it was the friendship itself. And I can feel that security and fullness of love in the disembodied presence of Friendship forged between these two guests. Stories, experiences, shared challenges, failures, successes, growth. Each shared element is offered freely and forged together to create a nest that keeps the active occupants of the friendship safe and warm and whole. It is familiar and cherished. Thank you for bringing it back into my home. What was my home, and business. And then so many things since my time. Don’t let the past repeat itself.”_

As suddenly as the scene had changed, it was restored. 

Crystal blinked slowly and her eyes had returned to their natural honey-brown hue. Link’s color and awareness were once again familiar to Rhett. His hair looked a little ruffled, and he seemed shaken. But he seemed… okay?

Link’s mouth worked around different ways to begin to speak before finally articulating, “What the crap was that?”

The medium calmly and quickly uttered what Rhett recognized as a closing prayer. Rhett felt beads of sweat forming along the back of his neck. He couldn’t stop wondering what lasting impact this otherworldly experience would leave on Link. What happened here… it wasn’t natural! He knew almost immediately that they wouldn’t be using this footage for the vlogs. Something about it seemed too private to share as a product. 

The candles in the room extinguished themselves. Or had Crystal done it without Rhett noticing? Rhett would have been willing to attribute the phenomenon to some worldly illusion or smoke and mirrors trick; but after what he had just witnessed, his mind was more open than ever.


	2. Ghost

Days passed since their experience with the séance, and Rhett continued to keep a close eye over Link. It was as if Rhett was waiting for some evidence of side-effect to present itself in his best friend. 

But Link seemed… fine. Sometimes he seemed  _ better _ than fine. Less anxious, as if Link had somehow held onto an element of Crystal’s peaceful and serene nature. 

It was a different kinda vibe than Rhett had ever gotten from Link. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Rhett had seen Link at peace before. Rhett thought back to their days as kids swimming in the Cape Fear. They’d climb out of the river to lay out on the sun-warmed rocks, and feel the glow of the sun as it dried their skin. At those times, Rhett would steal looks at Link, and he could recall having never seen him so… one with the universe. And that was exactly the kind of spiritual energy that Link seemed to effortlessly walk around with since the séance. Rhett loved that for Link. But he would be lying if he said that he couldn’t help himself waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Oddly enough, he also had the impression that Link was watching  _ him _ more closely. And that didn’t make sense, as Rhett had been largely unaffected by the séance. Apart from the lingering knowledge that he’d seen some weird shit! But he certainly didn’t require any… watching over. 

They were on the same page about not using footage from the actual séance. They couldn’t name the feeling that made them resistant toward sharing the experience in that way, but they both knew it when they felt it. They watched back the footage together to see if they might want to use some of the stuff from the tour of the shop, the short interview with its current owner, or maybe some atmospheric cuts of candlelight or the moments before the opening words were uttered… As they watched the recording, their jaws both dropped as they witnessed: nothing. An apparently entirely uneventful prayer circle by candlelight. 

There was no wind. The flames didn’t rise. They could hear Crystal’s chanting, and her welcoming the spirits and asking their questions. But the spirit’s answers to those questions, which had been conveyed through Link, were neither visible nor audible on the recording. 

“We didn’t..” Link said, curious, “...drink anything or put on any funny oils or lotions.”

“Link. You think Crystal would have  _ poisoned _ us?”

“I don’t think that, Rhett! But I am just trying to account for the… shared hallucination that we experienced. You did see it, right?” Link’s voice suddenly sounded very stretched and panicky. “You have to believe that George spoke through me!”

“Hey, hey,” Rhett touched Link’s hand, kind of… held it. He only wanted to comfort him, and reassure him. But he withdrew the hold on Link’s hand as his cheeks warmed with embarrassment. Sometimes he didn’t know what was comfort and what was… something else that he was trying to indulge. But Rhett vowed to himself that he would not take advantage of Link’s vulnerability to try to satisfy some childish yearning that he’d been nurturing, like a private haunting of his own. Rhett pulled his hands back into the pockets of his jeans, where they could be trusted. “Link, of course I believe you. Fuck what the camera captured. I saw it with my own eyes. I heard the voice. I felt the… chill. The air even  _ tasted _ different. I mean, I hadn’t known the guy’s name was George, but… there’s no denying what happened there. Not in my mind.”

“Good. Good…” Link took a shaky breath. “I’m beginning to feel like I made the whole thing up… or, like, something in my subconscious did...”

“Nah, man. I was there, too. It’s real.”

“Yeah, it is real, isn’t it?”

They shared silence for a moment. 

“Hey, Rhett? I think I’m gonna head home early, this day has been a lot.”

“Yeah, sure. I get it…” Rhett said, trying to hide his disappointment. He completely understood that Link needed to rest, he couldn’t fully imagine how draining this entire ordeal had been for him. Or perhaps continued to be? He still seemed to have some sort of connection to, if just a sense of empathy for, this George guy. Despite all of that, the last thing that Rhett wanted right now was to be apart from Link. 

“Would you, uh…” Link turned to add as he was leaving. “Would you wanna stop by my place later? I mean, I don’t need a babysitter or anything. Maybe you could just shoot me a text to check on me?”

“No, no way! I mean, yes.” Rhett’s desperation was getting the better of him. He just hadn’t had his usual talent for squashing it down. Not since the séance. “It’s no problem at all. I’ll stop by.”

Rhett pulled into Link’s driveway, and if he hadn’t explicitly been invited over he woulda sworn there wasn’t anybody home. The curtains were all drawn, and he couldn’t detect any lights on inside. He couldn’t help worry from creeping into his tightening throat. 

He knocked tentatively. Maybe Link had just fallen asleep. He was drained, and napping was an established self-defense mechanism for him. 

“It’s unlocked!” Link called out, though he did not come to the door. 

_ Odd, _ Rhett thought. But he let himself in regardless. He passed through the familiar apartment until he reached the dining room and a not so familiar sight. 

Link sat alone in what would have been a completely darkened room if not for the dozen or so lit candles that adorned the space. The candlelight softly lit up Link’s sharp features in a way that made Rhett’s stomach weak and fluttery. 

“We, uh… making another attempt to commune with  _ the beyond? _ ” Rhett asked. 

Link remained eerily quiet, and so calm that it unsettled Rhett. 

“If it wasn’t for the recent séance thing,” Rhett continued, trying hard to break the ice, which wasn’t easy to approach since all of the unease appeared to be on his side. “The only other thing that seeing you like this makes me think, is that maybe you got a romantic candlelit evening planned for us.” He forced a chuckle at his own half-joke. 

Link tilted his head. “And if that’s what this was, a romantic gesture.. What would you think about that?”

“I guess I’d need to know you weren’t kidding around, for starters.”

“I m not kidding. I’m deadly serious, you might say.”

Rhett swallowed the nervous, hopeful lump in his throat. Afraid that this was all going to evaporate without a trace, like the footage of the séance had. “What brought all of this on then?”

“George…” Link said, finally injecting some emotion into his peacefully blank demeanor. “...and William.”

“William?”

“He was the other owner of the hotel. George’s…  _ business partner _ .” Link sneered the last bit. 

“Were they… were they more than that?”

Link’s voice sounded like it was about to break. “They shoulda been.”

Link had barely started talking, and Rhett felt his eyes begin to well with emotion. 

“I could feel all of it, Rhett. When George spoke through me. They loved each other. They really loved each other. But they were so scared. And so comfortable. They made a life together, and told themselves it was enough. But they never said it out loud, they never… made each other really  _ feel _ it. With their bodies. And, Rhett, I felt a lifetime of yearning, and a lifetime of waiting for some  _ right time  _ that never freakin came for them. Time ran out and they… they loved each other as fully as two people can without confessing it openly, or... carnally. It was beautiful. But it was, and still is,  _ so painful.  _ I… I can’t spend the rest of my life comfortably yearning, setting myself up for an afterlife with even a shred of that kind of regret.”

Rhett’s throat had gone completely dry. “So… you want me to say something? Out loud? Or… how did you describe it? Carnally?” Rhett cocked an eyebrow. 

Link shook his head. “If you have anything…. Anything at all to say. I am  _ so open _ to hearing it.”

“I think I’ve probably loved you my whole life.” The words spilled out of Rhett’s mouth all at once, each one at the other’s heel. To the point where he wondered if Link would have been able to understand him. He was especially concerned about that when tears started to roll down Link’s cheeks in the candlelight.

Rhett quickly moved across the room to take Link’s hand in a way that he had done a thousand times before, but that now felt completely new. “And I have  _ wanted you _ for at least half that time.”

“Please don’t wait until we’re dead and haunting some tourist trap of an occult shop to take me.”

Rhett leaned down to kiss Link, rough and urgent. Link returned the act with matched ferocity, and Rhett quickly ascertained that they wouldn’t be making it to the bedroom. Link pulled them both down to the floor in the flickering candlelight and never had someone about to be devoured looked so hungry. 

The kisses softened and became more tender and deep as they began to flow into one another. And once they had felt out their security in one another’s touch, there was nothing aggressive or possessive in the way that their bodies came together. It felt… inevitable. As if their bodies always intrinsically knew that this would be their final form. Their natural state. It was like they had been born apart and had finally returned to completeness. There was a stillness in Rhett, the calming of a constant and frantically vibrating need that had finally been fulfilled. They were clumsy and unpracticed with one another, but none of it felt off. 

They were sweaty, smiling, and spent when they separated to clean up a little. Link grabbed some glasses of water, and at that point they decided to move into the bedroom. They lie together naked in comfortable quiet; everything between them having been shuffled and balanced. Rhett’s fingers idly traced paths up and down Link’s bare skin, leaving little trails of goosebumps behind their fleeting touches. 

“Hold me?” Link asked softly. 

The words had barely left Link’s lips before Rhett was following their suggestion. It was at that point, once Link was settled into Rhett’s embrace, that Rhett noticed that Link was crying. His silent release dampened Rhett’s arm and chest. 

“Are you okay? Are we… still good?”

“We’re exactly right,” Link assured him through a tight voice. “I just can’t stop thinking about George and William. They never got to have this. I wish they could have shared this together. George wanted it so much, his regret was palpable.”

“Were they happy?”

Link was quiet for a moment. 

“They really were. Their lives were dedicated and intertwined in every other way. They utterly and completely filled each other’s lives with life and love.”

“You know, Link… I don’t think you have to worry about those two. I could have died very happy with the way things were before now. As much as you’ve been willing to share with me at any given point in our lives… It’s always been enough. You’ve always been more than enough.”

Rhett could feel Link smiling into his chest. “I suppose you’re right. This new thing between us is beautiful, but you’ve always made me happy. I can see how their lives together are something to be celebrated, and not necessarily a tragedy that they lived and died together without… having a little more.”

“But, to be very clear, I’m glad that  _ we _ don’t have to live and die without it.”

Link’s grin widened and he pulled back slightly to crawl up Rhett’s body to nibble at his bearded lips. “I think we owe it to their memory to enjoy each other as often as we can.”

“Of course,” Rhett softly chuckled into the kisses, so new between them yet already so familiar and expected. “Out of respect for the dead.”

Together, they crawled under the sheets to once again celebrate life and death. 


End file.
